So far I've beaten two bosses and have lost only two heroes. i still have on of the heroes that you get from the start. Yes the game is punishing. Yes, RNG MAY ruin your run. However, you can flee at any poin of a run, saving your party from death (which may be wise sometimes).Maybe I'm just stratigically so much better than the average player that I don't notice the high difficulty problems that other players have.So far I have NONE problems with the difficulty of the game, eevrythign is fine and th egame is meant to hard and punishing. It's the same with Dwarf Fortress. the game jsut throws everything that is nasty and ugly and unfun at you but for some reason does this in a way that all this stuff still is fun to play.

So far I've beaten two bosses and have lost only two heroes. i still have on of the heroes that you get from the start. Yes the game is punishing. Yes, RNG MAY ruin your run. However, you can flee at any poin of a run, saving your party from death (which may be wise sometimes).Maybe I'm just stratigically so much better than the average player that I don't notice the high difficulty problems that other players have.So far I have NONE problems with the difficulty of the game, eevrythign is fine and th egame is meant to hard and punishing. It's the same with Dwarf Fortress. the game jsut throws everything that is nasty and ugly and unfun at you but for some reason does this in a way that all this stuff still is fun to play.

Is there a win condition in the game? Have you reached it? How long did it take?

No, I haven't reached the win condition so far (it was added only recently anyway and I started from new when the game got released, so I can see all the new changes) and funny enough, in theory you could win the game right after the first dungeon run.The victory condition is to win 4 runs in the Darkest Dungeon and close the portal. You can do this as early as possible (right after you've finished your first real dungeon run) but are encouraged to prepare first. The Darkest dungeon has a difficulty of 6.

The first real dungeon run is the first run after the tutorial. When you have completed the one in the ruins, you should unlock the Darkest Dungeon. Either it was this run or the next run after this one (I'm not sure anymore, was too long ago).Of course the Darkest Dungeon was added AFTER leaving Early Access, so if you haven't the game fter release, you couldn't have seen it. i'm also not sure what happens if you play on an older save, maybe you need to start a new one (I did anyway).

Well, since it was Early Acces you somehow except this to happen. In my opinion they waited too long with the last dungeon anyway, they could've put it in earlier, so people can test it before it goes live.

A lot of people have complained about the "grinding" aspect of the game.

The thing you need to remember about "grinding", is that it only exists in the player's mind. If a player is having fun, then what they are doing isn't grinding. In other words, the person who decides what is grinding and what is not, is ultimately the player.

Let's be quite clear, if the term "grinding" had any objective merit, MMOs as a genre could not exist, and neither could most ARPGs. However, given that there's a signficant percentage of the human population which enjoy these extremely time-consuming and repetitive games, clearly what is grinding to me is not grinding to someone else, and vice versa.

The term 'grinding' is generally used when the activity the player is engaged in no longer seems enjoyable or meaningful. But you're playing a f*cking video game, it was never meaningful for all practical purposes in the first place.

So having said that, Darkest Dungeon didn't feel like grinding to me. I thoroughly enjoyed the 100 hour trek to get where I am. Some others may disagree, and they would be welcome to that. For me what made it all bearable was the brutally difficult learning curve of the game, and the fact that death was permanent. Compare this to any given MMO, for example, where death has almost no penalty at all, and you just respawn a few minutes away to try again.

In spite of that, I still think the amount of time the game requires is a bit too long (I'll probably have to play another 20-30 hours to actually beat it), because I don't believe that 100+ hours required game play time is a reasonable requirement to put onto the player. Because of this, the vast majority of people who attempt Darkest Dungeon will probably never even make it half way before giving up or moving on to other games.

Difficulty:

The second thing people generally complain about is the game's difficulty. Since the game has no difficulty settings, prepare to lose at first, a lot, until you get some of the basics of the game down. There is quite a bit of room for experimentation, and the game expects you to fail miserably again and again, which is why recruiting heroes is free, and why there is no ultimate way to lose the campaign (though it doesn't tell you that, that's something you kind of figure out on your own).

Having said that, the game's difficulty is very linear, and the pacing is very well done. The "Easy" missions (level 1) are difficult at first, but once you get the hang of them, they aren't so bad. Then the "Medium" difficulty missions are a brutal step up, but you'll soon figure those out too. Finally, "Hard" is predictably even more of a jump than from Easy to Medium, but by that point you should be experienced enough with the game to prepare for that.

One really nice aspect is that once you've mastered a new difficulty, all the previous difficulties become cake in comparison, allowing you to run your lower characters through them, even at night, with high rates of success.

Night runs and the torch mechanics in general are absolutely BRILLIANT, and really allow the player to artificially increase or decrease their difficulty at will, for greater risks and rewards. This is one of the reasons the game doesn't feel that grindy, because even an "Easy" night run can still be challenging for an experienced players.

The game is split into 4 areas, The Ruins (Easiest/Noob Friendly), The Weald (Harder), The Cove and the Warrens (Very Hard). Each area has its own monsters, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and thus requires its own strategies on the part of the player. Something that works well in the Cove could get you DESTROYED in the Weald, and vice versa. As a player you have to become intimately familiar with all the tactics you have available to defeat a particular area. To make matters even more complex, each difficulty changes the required strategies heavily. On easy, a good team composition (Say Plague Doctor, Occultist, Highwayman, Crusader) could probably defeat any area, but once you get to medium that will no longer work. Strategies which used to absolutely CRUSH medium become largely ineffectual on hard. So not only do you have to familiarize yourself with each area for building a party, you essentially have to re-learn them for each difficulty.

Personally, I loved this. My over-analytic and strategic mind went into overdrive discovering new and innovative ways to tackle the unexpected and brutal challenges I faced. I watched in horror as old team compositions fell victim to the slaughter on higher difficulty runs, and was forced to rethink my strategy after losing several 'key members' of my team.

This is one area which the game does very, very right. We'll call it the "Ways to skin a cat effect". For any given situation or problem, there are so many ways to solve it as the player that the possibilities seem nearly limitless, perhaps even overwhelming. So few games give the player the strategic license to be so creative and innovative, in fact forcing them to do so, while giving them so many options to succeed in this regard, and letting them figure out on their own what works best.

In other words, were someone else in this forum to play 100 hours of this game, and achieve the same successes I have, I expect we would have very different strategies and team compositions to get to where we are, and I just find that to be fantastic.

So is the game difficult? Yes. Will it kick your ass repeatedly? Without a doubt. But once you figure out the key components to each area/difficulty, and have that "AHA moment", it goes from being brutal to extremely sensical and fairly easy like that.

I will say that you need to have the Curio guide open at all times until you've memorized them, or you've set yourself up for some undue stress (both literally and figuratively).

Which brings me to the final mechanic.

Stress:

One of the biggest complaints and fears I hear about this game is the stress mechanic. Personally, I think it's an amazing mechanic, and the brilliant equal to something like AI Progress in AI War in terms of how it must be maintained and managed.

I highly recommend this article, on Rock-Paper-Scissors, about how the game's stress mechanic produced such a visceral effect that it caused the writer himself to essentially have a mental breakdown, and to quit playing the game. Now that's what I call damn good design.

Having said all that, and after having read the article, you would think that the stress mechanic is extremely brutal and unfair, but actually I've found it to be one of the simplest parts of the game.

There's essentially two ways to handle stress on a mission:1. Party camping abilities, of which there are many, many skills that both reduce the stress of the entire party and prevent them from stressing further in the future (the best ones are on the Houndmaster, Crusader, and Jester). These are easily the best answer, and make handling stress a non-issue (at least for me).

2. High crit chance. Whenever a friendly character crits an enemy, it reduces their stress and often the stress of the entire party. This is often what makes night runs so great. Sure, you take a lot more damage from enemies, but given that you crit chances have risen to such a degree, stress itself often becomes a non-factor, allowing you to focus only on health and party survivability. There are also several classes which raise the crit chance for the entire party, either in battle, or with Party Camping abilities, and many items which facilitate this as well.

In other words, stress, though problematic, should not be the most difficult part of the game. It certainly should not, as it did for this reviewer, drive you to the point of insanity yourself. It can be managed in a myriad of different ways, and ultimately adds to the game's complexity and strategy quite significantly in the end.

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Final thoughts, this is one of the most enjoyable roguelikes I've ever played. Though the game does have some problems (specifically length), and is not for everybody, great moments of insight, clarity, and accomplishment will be rewarded to those willing to brave the unspeakable horrors of... The Darkest Dungeon.

« Last Edit: March 04, 2016, 09:12:40 PM by Wingflier »

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"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

1. The grinding. I never saw this as grinding. You're not just going into an open area and fighting really easy enemies over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for EXP. That's what "grinding" is to me, and it usually happens in a JRPG.

In this, it's just repetition... there's a huge difference. It's the same as in basically every roguelike ever. No matter which game it is, for the most part, you're going to repeat the same floors and fight the same enemies... albeit with procedural hilarity added... over and over again. A million billion times. But these games usually keep it interesting every time, that's what they're known for. But if someone cant deal with that, this entire genre isnt for them.

Heck, plenty of genres do this, really. I get this in shmups alot, where there are only like 5 stages, the game is 35 minutes long, but you're going to play those levels 10 squillion times, perhaps for 1000 hours or more, before you beat it. But it never feels grindy to me. It's just practice and challenge.

"Grinding" to me is always that repetition of a really EASY task every time. Like, braindead easy, no chance of losing at all, never anything different either.

2, the difficulty and stress mechanic: It's a bloody roguelike! What the hell does anyone expect? People should know, going into it, that they're going to lose, 5 billionty times before beating it... IF they beat it. This isnt some big AAA game that's all story and cutscenes and holds your hand so you definitely get a victory and thus buy the sequel. Roguelikes beat you over the head with your own face. That's what they do.

The Stress mechanic, to me, is actually a variant of a certain type of mechanic that shows up super-often in roguelikes, which I usually refer to as "anti-grinding". A mechanic that causes/forces you to at least somewhat rush through a dungeon; you cannot just stick around forever, or you WILL lose. You have to keep moving and keep up a pace, you're not able to just sit around and constantly clobber enemies to power up. Keeps you from ever being overlevelled. In the case of THIS game, it limits your exploration a bit, so that you have to make actual decisions about that. Keeps the challenge consistent, rather than constantly falling because you keep taking a million years to power up. There's alot of variations of this idea in the genre. Not all of them have it... for some of them, it just wouldnt make sense. But most traditional ones do. I've never seen a problem with the stress mechanic here... so long as it's balanced out right. When I played the game in it's earlier state, it was just a bit of a mess. Characters would flip the hell out if a small mouse looked at them funny. From what I've seen in videos of the game recently, this is no longer the case.

From what I've seen in videos of the game recently, this is no longer the case.

Like I said, I never played the game in Alpha, so I don't know what the mechanics were like then. I did hear it was a bit screwy for awhile, but this is why I don't play games in Early Access (pretty much ever).

Nowadays, managing stress is very easy. I just got done with a hard/long run in which I finished the mission with all of my party members having stress 0. The Houndmaster and the Crusader each have a whole party camping skill individually, which combined reduces stress by 25 total for each member, and then reduces further stress by 25% for 4 combats.

Combine that with the relatively high crit chances you get with the lategame items and upgrades, and there's just no reason it should ever be a problem. Don't get me wrong, you can build a party without these stress relief mechanics while camping, and that certainly makes it harder, but usually the characters which don't have guaranteed stress relief can somehow buff the party's crit chance (or their own), indirectly managing stress instead.

The biggest part of avoiding stress is having good scouting chance. For daytime runs, but even more importantly for night runs, leaving no chance for your party to get surprised is hugely important to long-term mission success. Generally speaking, one of the most stressful scenarios is when your entire party is out of order, and you have to spend the entire fight trying to get them back to the correct position as the enemy just pelts you over and over with either crits or stress-inducing abilities. Obviously, when your party composition is in order, you can take out the weaker, stress-creating units first, sometimes before they can even take their first action.

What I love so much about the stress mechanic is that it's a bit of a slow-killer. It does no actual damage to your party, and in some ways it's hugely preferable to actually taking HP damage. So in 1, 2, or even 3 battles, stress doesn't even really come into play. But as the mission carries on, it begins to grow to dangerous levels, until it has become a real problem that needs to be addressed (or else).

I just love that. It's like each group of enemies you encounter knows they can't defeat you individually, but they may be able to win the war by essentially slowly incapacitating your party until they become overwhelmed half way through the mission. It's like the inevitable slog towards insanity. One member becomes afflicted, essentially losing his or her mind with stress, and then slowly projects their insanity to the other party members, until they slowly succumb to the madness.

Of course, the exact opposite can happen as well. Sometimes, when the situation seems hopelessly dire, a party member's resolve is tested, and they overcome their fear to reach a godlike status. These situations, however rare, are absolutely f*cking epic.

The first time I ever attempted a hard run, I knew I was going to get destroyed. That's just the way the game is when you jump up difficulties, and I had no prior experience with it. In my party I had a Grave Robber, Jester, Hellion, and Houndmaster. It was a terrible setup for hard difficulty (despite my many successes with in on medium), but of course there was no way for me to know that.

From the very beginning, everything was going wrong. My party was missing their attacks (actually not that common), I kept getting critted, and I honestly had no idea what I was doing. To make matters worse, they were targeting my Grave Robber (which I colloquially refer to as just "The Assassin"), who was the main DPS of the party, with endless amounts of stress attacks.

By the third battle, she had reached her breaking point, and her resolve was tested.

You can not imagine the feeling of relief and raw adrenaline that came over me when her result was "POWERFUL". It was if my life had flashed before my eyes, only to realize that there was still hope.

After she overcame her fear, that Assassin carried that freaking team on her shoulders. Every fight she was buffing the entire team, positively encouraging them, and leading by example. And my god, was she an example.

By the final battle of the quest, the entire party was low health, and my Assassin got crit by an opponent, then began to bleed out. She died one round before I finished the mission. I lost her forever, but she died so the other members of that party could live. It was one of the most epic series of events I've ever experienced in the history of my life as a gamer.

« Last Edit: March 05, 2016, 12:15:48 AM by Wingflier »

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"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Aye, I find that the most awesome moments in gaming really do tend to come from games like that, and roguelikes in general. Where all of a sudden something absurd and just amazing and epic will happen, just out of the blue, and you dont see it coming at all, and it just changes everything.

Dwarf Fortress always seems the best at this, to me anyway. With the game's ridiculous depth it can create situations like that.

I remember one time I had one of those nasty super beast things rampaging around, sent the military to fight them, and very quickly, a couple of them got killed. One of the remaining ones just went totally bonkers, dove in front of the thing and started systematically KNOCKING ALL IT'S TEETH OUT. I had no idea WHY, but he just kept doing that. And it's swatting at him, and accomplishing nothing, and finally goes down when one of the others finishes it off with a massive crushing blow while it's distracted by unexpected dentistry. UNEXPECTED DENTISTRY. How many unstoppable monsters go down to something like that? It's kinda like the whole Boatmurdered thing, where the fortress was eventually overwhelmed because the front door got stuck open due to a butterfly somehow jamming itself into the mechanism of it, and it was just the final straw that toppled what little was still sane in there.

And it's like, just... yeah. That kind of thing doesnt happen in other genres at all really. Far as I'm concerned, awesome stuff like that is one of the biggest reasons to play these.

Graphics and soundThe graphics style may not be to everyones liking, but I find it perfect for this game. It fits the atmosphere and the minimalistic animations really make this style pop. I love it, it's one of the more beautiful dungeon crawls I've seen released in a long time.

Sound design seems to mimic this as well with sounds being suitably meaty and punchy and instilling fear and doubt with a horror undertone. Definitely top notch work on this!

Enemy variety and difficultyHaving not gotten much further than Veteran quests, I'd say the enemy variety is decent, if not fantastic. You tend to run in to the same type of enemies a lot, even during a single run. However, even though this has happened a lot I don't feel like it hurts the game in any way, instead giving you an option to learn how to deal with the enemy types before encountering new ones. Each region also have their own unique set of enemies which helps spice things up.

Enemy difficulty varies wildly with some being absolute pushovers and posing no threat at all, while others can be potentially party-wipers on their own.

Tutorial/helpI find that the game has a competent tutorial system, but there is a lot that is not explained well at all. I've had multiple instances, even after 20+ hours of gameplay where I'm left scratching my head and thinking "what just happened?". There are a lot of these things that could be better explained, especially the speed stat, as I've had it happen more than once that the enemy party gets to act twice before I have a chance to react. Which leads us to the next point:

UnfairnessThis is where people's opinions likely will diverge. Some find it perfectly fine that the game is stacked against you and completely unfair. I am however not one of those. I don't mind difficult games. Heck, I play roguelikes almost daily, I find Dark Souls to be one of the best action RPGs of today, and I'm an avid Dwarf Fortress fan.

What I don't like however is how utterly stacked this game is. I've had multiple parties wiped out without me even getting a chance to act. Enter combat, and even without "SURPRISED!", the enemy party acts first, stunning two members, and starts stacking stress. I've had instances where a party has started with near (>10) no stress and ended up at 150+ after a single battle. This in spite of me doing everything to stop the casters. Some enemy parties simply have too many casters, or too much protection for the casters, to be beatable with a lvl 2-3 party.

Then begins the downward spiral where the party, on its own, begins stacking stress, skipping turns, refusing healing all while the enemy party picks you apart one by one. Eventually you reach the point where you are so fed up with the fight that you say, "FINE, I'll retreat and call this a loss." But nope. You can't retreat, because it's the enemies turn right now, and you see they get to act three times before you do anything, in spite of having a SPD debuff on them and you having a SPD buff. So two of your party members go from 50% HP to dead in those three turns where you were not allowed to act, a third one dies to heart attack and at that point you just ragequit because you were never given a chance to properly act.

Yeah, there are likely people who will say "You didn't prepare", "You should've run earlier" or "git gud nub". But you know what? I play games for fun and while DD definitely has a lot of fun in it, these moments where control is completely taken out of your hands, everything is stacked against you, the RNG gives you the finger and you wipe yet another party in a single battle even though you had good health and stress levels beforehand...those moments just make the game incredibly frustrating and unfair. That's also why I decided to not even bother anymore.

ConclusionIf you find stacked odds and a lot of frustrating failiure to be fun, by all means, give DD a try because there's a lot to like here. The graphics and sound are great. The battle mechanics are, for the most part, really nice albeit a bit limited. It's just the endless frustration of knowing that the next battle could be the one that completely screws you over out of the blue. There is too much RNG in this game for my taste, and that puts it well beyond my control whether I win or lose.

Yes, it's a roguelike and it's supposed to be hard, but this game is literally stacked against you and can wipe an entire party without you really having any kind of input on it. That is ridiculously frustrating and really unfair. That's what really murders the enjoyment in this game.

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You probably had the wrong party composition, a lot of players make this mistake.I agree however on the point that DD has a problem with "1 turn hug ups" where monsters suddenly pull up some nasty trick up that either leaves everyone mad or will kill your most important heroes. I'm also not a fan of loosing your high leveled heroes for good because the RNG was simply worse (a pretty terrible crit, surprise attack, affliction that screws you over).

About stats: Everyone attacks in each round once. No exceptions. The turn order in which one attacks is however randomly decided at the START of the round. This is affected somewhat by speed. Hogher speed means you are more likely to act first on your round. Highwayman are perfect to punish the more nasty enemies because they have high speed and really good attacks up their sleeve. If you have one already, Graverobber. She is a BEAST with the speed stats and she has also high evasion, makign it hard to hit her in any way. She can even boost this more. If you want to be safe, put Spd items on stunners. If you can stun important enemies in the first round before they can act, you have a chance to react with your damage dealers and kill some.

Healing: A lot of people think that you have to heal your party always full. This is terribly untrue in this game. I don't know how or even if you use healign but have at least one healer in every party, even if he can only heal 1 point (liek the Pest Doctor). This is because heroes NEVER die if they hit 0 hp. Only after they have 0 hp and get hit again they have a CHANCE to die (that is even really small and does decrease the higher you rank your heroes). So simply healign always them to 1 Hp means they are SAFE as long as you can divide the damage across multiple heroes. Do the math yourself, this simply means you have to decrease the enemies to a specidfic amount or use other heroes as distraction. Heroes then can mark themself (whicha re then more liekly to be attacked) are useful for tanking. Use healers only for heals if your heroes have 0 HP, otherwise attack with them as well or apply buffs/debuffs.Stress healers should also be in a Party if you do longer runs. There is no safe way to say how much stress will rise, there are multiple factors and with some enemies even applying stress, you should have a hero that can heal stress. On longer runs you can camp anyway and most heroes have something to reduce stress as camping skill. On Boss runs you hould always have a jester. Best stress reducer int he party plus good buffer. Also, feats/perks are extremely important on heroes. Soemthign that increases stress on ruins ina ruin run is of course a dumb mistake. In my first runs I said that wouldn't affect me so much but it did. In the long run you will notice a big decrease in gold income because you spend more to heal stress. On good runs you don't even need to heal stress because they will heal it over time. Aslso, if you run out of gold, consider dark runs (runs without light sources at all), this increases the amount of treasures but also the risk of dying. Use only heroes that are preapred for this. Dark runs are extremely helpful to gain gold which means you can spend more on hero upgrades and so on.

Also, I love the soundtrack of Darkest Dungeon. I just have to say it, the game uses the perfect music to underlay the stressful atmosphere of the game, the panic that rises, the dread of the grotesque enemies. The best one os the battle music in the warrens.

Don't give up because DD is unfair. And it IS unfair. In many ways. The challange and fun int he game is to reduce the amount of unfairness so you get a good run. Daerkest Dungeon is meant to be played that way, the developers stressed in every update that the game is not about having a safe run. At all. It's always a stressful, unfair and hopeless situation on your end and the only way to win is to make the best out of the worst. This has nothign to do with "git gud", it just means how much stess can you endure on yourself, how much fun can you get out of thi. People that find this too frustrating simply shouldn't play this game. There is a reason why DD has such highly praised reviews, people simply like this concept. Not everyone, so... just play another game. That's how it works anyway with the gaming community, if a gameplay style does not fit for you, play something else.

It's the same pretty much for me with ARK. I don't liek the concept at all, so probably the game is not meant for me.

Yes, it's a roguelike and it's supposed to be hard, but this game is literally stacked against you and can wipe an entire party without you really having any kind of input on it. That is ridiculously frustrating and really unfair. That's what really murders the enjoyment in this game.

On the note of unfairness, I tend to agree with Mana on this one. I dont like it in games like this either. This game had seemed pretty good to me for awhile, but... after enough time with it, it's sorta "meh" to me at this point. I rather lost interest.

It's yet another example of "fake difficulty", as the game is STUFFED with it. It ends up being like the devs didn't REALLY know how to create proper challenge within the framework they'd created. I mean, there are alot of games that are MUCH harder than this... yet where skill can always triumph even when the RNG is being an absolute snot. This game with it's "you dont get to take a turn" deaths just gets old. It makes me think of roguelikes with bad identification mechanics, where you *must* take a chance with new items eventually, and they *can* kill you pretty much instantly, and no amount of strategy and planning can make it so that you have a reliable and workable way of approaching it. To me, it's bloody awful design.

At this point, I"m honestly kinda surprised that this game got as popular as it has, really.